Fire Divinations: Collective Enquiry

The third of four “divinations” that will inform the creation of the Brent Biennial 2025. A one-day programme structured around fire, featuring workshops and collective imagining.

Why Fire?

Critical for life; giving warmth, light and ability to purify and transform materials (including food). Fire represents creativity and deconstruction, this element challenges the notion that structures should be built to last forever. It explores the potential for powerful and transformative constructions as well as the beauty of (im)materiality transformed by fire. It speaks also to transfer across dimensions: incense, effigies, burning pyres, cremation.

The four elements: the foundations of our collective enquiry

(Re)building requires the four elements. Earth, water, fire and air form the basis of many ancient philosophical systems; they are the essential ingredients in the alchemical processes of creation and transformation. Each element symbolises and energises a deeper understanding of different facets of existence. When combined, these essential elements have the potential to reconfigure our understanding of structures and knowledge, and help us to remake our world.

The Venue

Wing Yip

The day’s activities begins at Wing Yip Superstore Cricklewood, before moving to Metroland Studios. Address: 395 Edgware Rd, London NW2 6LN.

Metroland Studios

Fire Divinations will be held at Metroland Studios, our home just behind Kilburn Market. If you’re not sure how to get there, watch the film we made showing the route from Kilburn Park underground station. The gallery and social space where the Divinations events will be held are wheelchair accessible with step free access. There are three gender neutral and wheelchair accessible toilets.

The Programme

9.45 Meet at Wing Yip Cricklewood

The day’s activities begin at Wing Yip. Please kindly meet promptly at 9.45am for the registration and briefing.

10.00am Deheat Hair Veg下火髮菜 – Yarli Allison and Orin Chung (90 mins)

Join us to get your hands dirty, to deheat (or restore heat) with medicinal plants – and to make your hair feel new!

Artist Yarli Allison and botanical designer Orin Chung invites you to craft in “Deheat Hair Veg 下火髮菜”, a hands-on workshop that revives ancient plant-based healing methods in thinking about modern medicine approaches with future biotechnologies. Drawing from practices of ‘Deep Medicine’ (Raj Patel and Rupa Marya) alongside Sino-botanical wisdom on addressing imbalances in the inner body like ‘heat toxins’ (Cantonese: 熱毒 Jit6 Duk6) and ‘damp-heat’ (濕熱 Sap1 Jit6), the artists invite you to restore the harmony of your full being — to connect symptoms as part of an interwoven web of identities, stories, people, non-humans, land, and environments while biotech advances. 

11.30 [Travel time between Wing Yip and Metroland Studios]

12.30am Red Tongue | Rapid Pulse – Sue Man (2 hours, including lunch)

When desire ignites, and inevitably, friction occurs – our heart rates increase and the central nervous system becomes agitated. How easily we tip into the red – tempers flare and speech gets spicy.
Conflict is part and parcel of energetic exchange, whether we’re asking to be heard, seen, or supported, as we struggle with the challenges of life and working within inequitable systems that play us off against each other with the logics of scarcity.

Our capacity for love and relations is recognising and de-stigmatising the bumps and humps in community relations, and is expanded by the willingness to ‘stay with the trouble’ and sit with the discomfort, while holding onto our mutual aims of personal and political transformations.

Join artist Sue Man who will introduce and guide us her journey in eastern philosophy and exploration in traditional chinese medicine as expressed in the communal hotpots and holding of space for rage and playful, creative encounters with East Asian food as effigy tributes for transmogrifying grudges and anxiety into nourishment. The aim is to seek out co-metabolic processes of care and repair, beyond the limitations of language, that honour different experiences and fragilities, in our shared time and space.

14:30pm Fire Lighters – JJ Chan & Friends (2 hours)

This workshop was inspired by warning signs found in public parks, indicating a ban on lighting fires. It is named after the people who crave to light fires in spite of those rules; for whatever reason that might be. JJ invites you to engage in a thought-experiment through friendship and conversation, ignited by collage and badge-making, to unpack fire’s indictment in public spaces. Where the lighting of a flame can symbolise unions of desire, hope, prayer, community, warmth, kinship, trauma and loss, we unpack the implications of regulatory bylaws, which present civic care and disobedience in binary opposition.

Together we will consider how small acts of creativity can ignite raging solidarity and heat social and political alliances, fuelling passionate and critical connections. Used prolifically across activist subcultures, political groups, trade unions, businesses, charities, and fan communities, badges tell others who a person is and who they’re with. Together we will consider if and how this small wearable object, in confined spaces, might ignite a flame that spreads to everything it touches; how nurturing new and expansive critical connections can enable these flames to grow stronger, and grow wild. As part of Metroland Cultures’ wider Collective Enquiry, this workshop attempts a different way to hold critical discussion and to establish new unions.

16:30pm Afternoon Tea and Coffee Break

17:00pm Offerings (for yesterday, today and tomorrow) – Francesca Telling (2 hours)

In this workshop we will explore the journeys taken by ourselves and others across intergenerational, local and global memory – opening dialogue around how we preserve existing knowledge within our communities and use archives to navigate through present contexts. Using fire as a container for conversations across time, we will work together with paper to fold and form collective offerings which can be burnt in vigil, votive or protest acts.

Please bring materials with you from your personal or family archive. They should be items you are comfortable speaking about with others. Examples of what you could bring include photographs, documents, objects, receipts, tickets, letters, news clippings, published material or textiles. You will be able to take the materials back home with you after the workshop.

19:00 End

About the Artists

Yarli Allison

Yarli Allison is a Canadian-born, Hong Kongese art-worker based in London with an interdisciplinary approach traversing sculpture, XR, film, drawings, tattooing, and performances. Yarli graduated with an MFA first-class honour from The Slade School of Fine Art. Yarli’s works have been exhibited at Tai Kwun Contemporary Museum, Barbican Centre, Institute of Contemporary Arts: ICA London, and the V&A Museum. Recent project grants were awarded to Yarli by the Arts Council England, the Canadian Council for the Arts, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Through their work, Yarli explores themes of digital humanity along with belonging, decolonisation, biotech ethics, feminist futures, and queer solar punk scenarios.

Orin Chung

Orin Chung is a London-based floral and botanical designer and the founder of Oxygen Flower Studio. Known for his transformative installations, Orin reimagines spaces through carefully curated floral compositions that often feel like spatial teleportation, turning environments into ethereal, immersive experiences.

Orin’s background in fashion design informs his practice in floral artistry, bringing meticulous craftsmanship, conceptual thinking, and a hands-on experimentation approach to colour, form, material, and texture. This experience has also refined his eye for composition and structure, enabling him to explore new techniques and creative possibilities in his floral work.

Sue Man 

Swedish born and raised with Chinese heritage, London-based Sue Man is a artist and cultural producer. Repurposing her family trade in hospitality as a tool to radically mobilise intergenerational narratives in underrepresented communities, her practice evolves daily from creating large-scale banners for protests and collages using recycled textiles, to sculpting organic-inspired ceramic work. She has been facilitating creative workshops for the London institutions and communities for the past 15 years. 

Francesca Telling

Francesca Telling is an artist and facilitator interested in how institutional and anti-institutional knowledge is produced between the archive, classroom, family and community. Rooted in archival research, her works aim to complicate hierarchies across forms of documentation – developing through understanding what is preserved or lost in the interpersonal making of diasporic histories. She collects objects, images and inherited memories, exploring how their re-emergence in photography, print, language and time-based media can make sense of fragmented records tied to people and place.

JJ Chan & Friends

JJ Chan & Friends is the collective noun referring to JJ Chan and their collaborative partners. JJ often works collectively with others, many of whom do not (yet) consider themselves to be artists. This has led to projects with neighbours, friends, community groups, work colleagues and their students, across differing but mutually implicating social contexts. Their work draws from lived experiences and eavesdropped conversations, to explore the edges of our everyday realities and the ways in which we construct our identities. Through storytelling and world-building, they search for an alternative space beyond aggressively progressive capitalist time, seeking new worlds from the ashes of the present.

Many Thanks

Fire Divinations is made possible by the generous support of Wing Yip.

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Divinations: a collective enquiry

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